On Futurology

If history studies our past and social sciences study our present, what is the study of our future? Future(s) Studies (colloquially called "future(s)" by many of the field's practitioners) is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to hypothesize the possible, probable, preferable, or alternative future(s).

One of the fundamental assumptions in future(s) studies is that the future is plural rather than singular, that is, that it consists of alternative future(s) of varying degrees of likelihood but that it is impossible in principle to say with certainty which one will occur.

It would be too hard to regulate people printing everyday, utilitarian objects. If 3D printing takes off the way I hope then there would be a new market for design and raw materials. Instead of buying name brands you could contract a local designer to make something for you. 3D printing can shift consumerism from a top down market to something more like a network. There is a potential for the lateral movement of money between individuals instead of up or down from producer to consumer. People will keep spending money. Where the money goes has constantly changed for thousands of years and will keep on changing.

I imagine market emphasis will shift from goods production to materials. Large corporate organizations currently occupied with producing apparel like Nike will have to adapt to this new market reality before it consigns them to history.

Sweatshops will likely also shift their emphasis to the raw material aspect of clothes production, so this period of change offers a window to improve the lot of a great many people in the developing world.

Sweatshops will likely also shift their emphasis to the raw material aspect of clothes production, so this period of change offers a window to improve the lot of a great many people in the developing world.

Or they'll just be fired. Machines already do that, people are mostly used for assembly.

Except it won't take off, because it will never be economical to print everyday objects. 3d printing is a fantastic tool for rapid prototyping, but it will never replace mass production for physical reasons.

Not anytime soon, but give a couple decades and... who knows? Technology moves fast. Just look at computers. Most people today have the computing power of lunar race NASA in their pocket. Hell, just look at a little over half a century ago.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

Popular Mechanics, 1949

Who's to say there won't be some kind of breakthrough that allows for cheap 3d printing of some kind using multiple materials?

But the fact remains that any argument of "technology moves fast" can be applied to mass production as well. Barring a world-shattering breakthrough to do with the ability to transmute materials in an energy efficient way, the historical trend has been for economies of scale, not against it.

You're right. I think /u/chandr's point is merely not to make generalizations about the future. Maybe it won't take off. /u/What_Is_X listed reasons that are certainly applicable today. The question is if they'll still be applicable in, say, two decades.

In my very limited experience, humans suck at predicting the long term future.

This is just fantasy. You can already buy products of almost any kind at barely above the cost of materials. 3D printing doesn't reduce the cost of producing things.

3D printed shoes? Are you serious? The vast majority of shoes are not marked up. You don't have to buy "name brands." Meanwhile, shoe manufacture requires some very specific material properties. 3D printers can't make a good shoe.

The lack of factual basis or understanding of materials and manufacture in 3D printer discussions is grating.

Technology does improve over time, you know. Where do you suspect 3D printing to go, 20 years down the line? Do you think people will continue making simple things, or do you think someone will get bored of the standard and innovate a way to print other materials or more complex shapes?

Sure, you could be right. We may never 3D print shoes. That may very well be impossible.

According to Nike, design at this speed would not be possible without 3D printing.

"Using traditional prototyping methods, it might've taken us years to translate these learnings on to an actual cleat for the field," Nike said in the video released with the announcement. "But with 3D printing, it could be just a matter of hours."

They built a prototype using 3D printing. Not a commercial product. The commercial product would still be injection molded, because that would be much cheaper.

I am not "underestimating laziness." If 3D-printed materials really could deliver a product that saved effort on the part of consumers, that would be a valid point in their favor.

I don't think they can deliver that, though. Your shoes will require tens of hours to print, possibly require you to debug your printer, require you to attend to the machine to feed it stock or remove pieces, and require some amount of labor even after printing, for assembly. In general, "DIY" does not appeal to the "lazy."

You do realize that, on a large timeline, we're only within the first few hours of the existence of 3D printing. Use your imagination a little. Yeah, sure, you're good at pointing out the shortcomings of today's abilities. Anyone can do that. But there's some engineer out there who sees the problem, imagines a solution, and will develop it in a way that any idiot can print their own shoes.

We're 30 years into the desktop publishing revolution and people still pay someone to print their wedding announcements for them, and that's something where an electronic version is a functional substitute. I would not be selling my shoe company stock if I owned any.

Nobody is telling you to sell your shoe company stock, nor is anyone saying that tomorrow Nike is going to close its doors. But I think it's naive to think 3D printing technology will not continue to improve to the point of printing objects like shoes.

Yeah, 3D printing has only been around for like 50 years, so it can improve. Materials science could improve it.

But mass manufacturing can also improve. Materials science can improve that, too.

There's no actual reason to think 3D printing will become competitive with mass manufacturing techniques, certainly not on price.

There's good reason to suppose otherwise, since 3D printing needs to replace all mass manufacturing techniques to be competitive, before which point, 3D-printed components could be incorporated into mass manufactured products (using the techniques of large-scale manufacture to make this economical). Similar to how, e.g., CNC-cut sheet materials can be assembled along with components that are not CNC-cut.

I don't see how getting custom 3D printed shoes made appeals to people's laziness. It seems to be the most labor intensive method of obtaining shoes of every method you mentioned, and probably the most expensive.

Most of the cost of goods comes from shipping. Sure, it only cost $.07 in labor to have that shoe assembled, but now it has to make it from Malaysia to your market. That's what 3D printing stands to eliminate. As far as how good that shoe is, you can custom design and fit it to each customer. I'll try to find it, but I heard an NPR story a couple years back about printing out a custom fit shoe sole, and everyone involved that got to try the process said it was the most comfortable foot wear they had every tried.

I would think the printing materials would still be manufactured in some poor country where it's alright to dump the toxic waste right outside the factory; just a guess as I don't have any actual knowledge of this topic.

3d printers can't print shoes yet, but there's no reason they won't be able to some day. I wear flip flops most says by obokashi which are just a stiff injection molded rubber. They're incredibly durable and comfy, and there's no reason that someday a 3d printer couldn't make them. The technology is growing fast.

This article mentions regulation by government to stop people printing say plastic show curtain rings. How the hell would you regulate something like that? If it is going to save people, time and money and with advancing tech get cheaper and faster with more materials available how is a store going to compete!

time and money and with advancing tech get cheaper and faster with more materials available how is a store going to compete!

That's exactly why the 1% have created a system with so much bureaucracy and regulation that they can lobby to get what they want. You think rich people are going to let you make shit at home that competes with their products?

Even if they didn't "fail", the time, money, and effort poured into cracking draconian DRM would already be several orders of magnitude higher than the time, money, and effort put into creating the DRM in the first place. Just look at piracy in the entertainment industry to see what I mean. It was already futile before it ever began.

This will lead to A LOT of lawsuits. I expect it to be like Napster debacle times 100.

But, hopefully, it won't be like the music industry is now.

People who are saying that 3D technology won't be able to compete in price and quality don't realize that this was said about almost every industry.

Personal computers are probably the best analogy. Look at the first computers, ENIAC was a monster. It was literally the size of a building. Here is a quote about it's size:

It measured approximately 2.4m by 0.9m by 30.5m and weighed roughly 30 metric tons. It contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and close to five million hand-soldered joints. All of this consumed about 160 kW of power.

Only 70 years later, the iPad was created with 21.6 billion operations per second (5.6 billion % increase) at a small fraction of the cost and weight.

The future is exciting, but a little scary because of how much power corporations have.

I could see two worlds:

1) Corporations control the vast bulk of 3D printers, designs, and materials. They are all way overpriced because of the collusion between these three industries. It's the worst of both worlds: jobs are killed because of 3D printing, yet it used only to enrich the powerful oligarch corporations.

You have to buy an expensive special license to buy a 3D printer. You aren't allowed to torrent designs or suffer severe financial fines. Materials are expensive as typical 3D material is taxed with a special "3D Label".
Instead of factories, consumer goods are built at 3D printing shops where the goods are printed, but all with prices jacked up for all the "royalities" required to pay the corporations that own all the patents.

Essentially, corporations that own all the patents don't have to build the products, the 3D stores do that, they just collect payments from the stores (and you) as the stuff you want is printed on demand.

No more factories: fewer jobs

Less retail stores: fewer jobs

So, in the end, corporations make more money but there are fewer jobs for people to work. Inequality explodes even further.

2) The free market prevails, our anti-trust laws are enforced, people are allowed to download designs, buy 3D printers, buy cheap materials, and modify them as they like. There is a big jump in the quality of life as people swap cool hacks and designs for food, shoes, clothes, and other basic personal belongings, crowdsourcing at it's best. And materials are recycled as things become old, broken or out-of-style.

For Example: shredding old clothes and the 3D printer just prints the latest style. Fashion without the waste.

Jobs are lost, but since everything is much cheaper, quality of life still goes up.

I honestly highly, highly doubt it. I honestly do not possess the ability to think that that government/business model can still successfully exist by the time 3D printing reaches this level of mainstream use.

I'd love this as a runner who frequently puts 400 miles fairly quick before replacing my shoes. Though I'm guessing the DRM will only allow me to print once. It'd be nice if I could print it a few times so long as I have the materials.

Well there's a difference between someone having to go to a 9 to 5 job being given tasks to do for a well off company that will fire them to save profits, and a bunch of teenagers or bored middle aged people fiddling around with a puzzle and gaining fame and recognition on their flex-time hobby achievements.

If they're smart, they can just switch to supplying appropriate materials and licencing their own designs. I'm sure kids would still be able to persuade their parents to pay for the branded 3D printer patterns, made with 'special' materials, the same way Monster can con people into thinking that their HDMI cables are worth it.

I think printing can be great for one off items, or intricate spare parts that would take a lot of machining to make. It would certainly be cheaper.
Printing toothbrushes may never take off since you can buy them for next to nothing. Even better, a trip to the dentist usually nets you a free toothbrush.

Personally, I am not sure I want printed plastic shoes. There is something great about a nice leather shoe and how it feels.

A mouth full of titanium has been on my to-do list for about a decade now, but not just simple titanium teeth. I got creative! What I've really wanted to get is modular implants. Titanium posts in my jaw would hold clip-and-lock denture sets. One set could be perfectly normal teeth for day-to-day social normality, but then I could have RAZOR FANGS OF TONGUE-MUTILATION for special occasions. :D

If 3D printing is anything like 2D printing, material cost, quality and market dynamics will make it sensible only in limited applications. Mass production will remain the more economical and common option.

I think you have to look farther afield than just 3D printers. Robot assembly is something that will show up in people's homes in the near future. The cost to buy or build robots keeps dropping and the software to run them continues to get better and better. Sort of like computers that once took up whole rooms, manufacturing robots will shrink and be turned into hobbyist projects and consumer products.

Tying that back into your leather shoe; feed the robot some leather and insert the sewing machine attachment and you can add a leather upper to your 3D-printed sole.

It had nothing to do with his hygiene but an x-ray picked it up regardless. It's the stuff you can't see from the bathroom mirror or pick up in your own breath that can cause trouble later on. By the time you feel it, the damage is there.

That's exactly what it is. My dentist once told me that genetics has way more to do with teeth than what you eat and how well you take care of them- although those things do matter, particularly for those with already troublesome teeth. I hardly ever go, I had a cavity about five years ago and one when I was a kid, but other than that I've never had any issues. I brush my teeth regularly, but flossing? the fuck is that? If I pass out occasionally without brushing them I don't panic and just do it in the morning.

My sister, however, who is a brush and floss-a-holic and takes impeccable care of her teeth, she will get a cavity every year.

Whoever said that they have to be made out of cheap and low-quality plastic?

I wonder if just buying some high quality materials and 3d printing them off a publicly available file to make high quality shoes would be cheaper than the exorbitant markups charged by companies like Nike and Adidas.

Ideally for $10 or $15 worth of materials I could print boots that I would be comfortable hiking with deep in the mountains or working on a construction site. Those require really high quality.

I have thought about this a lot. If you are building something and need a really unusual piece, you could design it yourself and print it. Lose a piece? Print a replacement. You could also use it for making a whole bunch of more basic pieces if you're building something large and don't have enough. 3D printing would really make legos even more fun than they already are.

Say 3D printing really does take off, and devices become easier to use, faster, smaller, etc., isn't the need for raw materials still going to limit the possibilities? 3D printers don't create things out of thin air, it requires materials, like a typical printer requires paper and ink. In order to create anything substanital, you still need the materials.

The biggest problem isn't even material quantity, but variety. Modern 3d printer can print exactly one material. If you want another material, you need a completely different type of printer. There are advanced printers that can give you hard plastic and soft plastic or plastic in a different color. But you are not going to get metal and plastic out of the same printer anytime soon, let alone all the other stuff you need to build something useful.

For the foreseeable future the home 3D printer will be limited to plastic trinkets, while the professional ones will be custom build for a specific purpose. For the Star Trek replicator to happen we basically need to invent completely new ways of dealing with materials and the current 3D printer hype isn't really bringing us any closer, as they are an evolutionary dead end.

That said, it might be possible to setup a production line with numerous different types of printers and robots in between that will collect and assemble the different printed pieces. I just don't expect that to show up in anybodies basement anytime soon, but it might be good enough as a sort of mail-order-replicator.

I think its conceivable that a 3D printer could have the ability to print multiple materials in the future. Certainly not the foreseeable future, but eventually. However, even if this did exist, the storage for the materials required to produce anything remotely intricate would be massive. There is no way a consumer would be able/willing to house something like that. I can't see it every really bridging the gap into widespread consumer usage.

They are to machining sort of what the Apple ][ was to computer graphics. Pretty amazing at the time, and you could do it in your home -- but at the end of the day it was still just 140x192 6-color graphics. Kids whose first computer was a castoff iphone would be ... underwhelmed. (Then again, there are full-speed Apple ][ simulators written in Java, FFS...)

On the other hand, look what happened to personal computers in the time between 1980 and 2014. If 3D printing does anything remotely similar, we're in for a Hell of a ride.

Also check out /r/reprap if you want to build your own printer. It's a fantastic subreddit if you need help. Approach this as a hobby and a learning experience in getting to know the finer points of the current open source state-of-the-art and you'll have a good time. If you want to just make stuff then I suggest getting a complete model or well documented kit. You will not save time self sourcing and the money you saved building your own printer versus buying a complete one will be offset by the great deal of time you will spend troubleshooting and fine tuning. Consider if weeks of frustration (if you don't like to tinker) are worth the extra cost of a complete kit.

Makerfarm has top notch customer support if you want to build your own printer.

Avoid MakerBot as they are overpriced for the level performance you get from your printer, and they've fallen behind what the features and quality some current printer models can do. There are better options in both quality and price point.

There's a sale for $150 off parts at Misumi that goes until the end of the month if you're really interested in

I feel like owning a 3D printer and buying raw materials and printing your own design would still be way more expensive than buying a mass produced product. You can already get shoes for dirt cheap at Target from manufactures who buy material at scale you can't ever match and use generic designs. If you want nice shoes you're already paying a premium for a design and printing it yourself won't change that. Unless they're just saying we should steal designs and print them cheaper, which really already happens at retail. Mid-market products are almost always based on upscale designs. People pay for the label.

There is also a halfway point with this as some things just won't be all that 3D printable due to the nature of how some materials need to be baked/cured/vacuumed/stretched/etc.

But what can happen is that smaller companies could 3D print the highly custom equipment needed to make shoes. Also this equipment can be highly robotic. So instead of necessarily printing your own shoes; there might be a company in the local business park that makes excellent shoes. There are many advantages to that. The factory could still make licensed name brand shoes. The delivery time is very short which means that stores can order roughly as they need them and the factory can largely only makes shoes that are ordered. This results in a simpler distribution and marketing along with vastly reduced logistics costs such as excess products then then have to go on an end of season fire sale.

Another aspect of 3D printing combined with traditional manufacturing is that 3D is great for small scale. Thus a bike store with a natural bike engineer can begin producing small batches of an excellent new brake design. Then as sales go up 3D printing can be partially replaced with more traditional manufacturing. This means that many large companies will find that their dominant positions will be under continuous assault.

Lastly open source will be devastating to companies who have paid for assembly lines of boring products. Looking at what a contractor needs to build a house it may be worthwhile for that contractor to either have a printing machine or to have access to a local low cost printing machine. This way the contractor could print vast amounts of the hardware needed for a house. Very little of what goes into a house is terribly difficult for today's 3D printers such as doorknobs, hinges, and various things such as brackets, gutters, etc.

Then if electrical bits can be safely printed then the remaining bits such as light switches will then be off the list of manufactured goods.

This last might seem like a small thing but there are many many family owned factories where the family is stunningly wealthy and all they do is produce something like doorknobs. The reason that they don't end up with a zillion competitors is that their factory has no loans and as long as they keep their profits below the financing of a new factory then they generally remain safe. That plus established relationships with stores and distributors keeps the wolves away from their money fountains.

You can't print good shoes with anything that will be available on the scale of typical 3d printers. Good shoes require a big array of varied materials and processing than a simple one materiel printing process. There is no reason to believe that 3d printers with that sort of capability will ever be cheap enough for one person to have one the way they have, say, a car.

And that's hardly a bad thing, because single person/family ownership is incredibly inefficient. Renting is far more efficient, because it gets more use out of things. That's the way of the future.

And here's another thing - as cheap 3d printing advances, so does expensive 3d printing, and so does manufacturing in general. Even if we had 3d printers that could make the sort of products we enjoy today in every house because they're so damn cheap, those products would be utter shit compared to what can be made by the more advanced, expensive manufacturing processes. Using household sewing materials and what's lying around your house, you could make primitive shoes. Is that utterly irrelevant because more advanced shit is available, to the point where you'd be better off using old modern shoes that someone threw or gave away? Yes.

But what no one seems to consider is that people might not only just copy things, but all together create new stuff themselves! Things that might not be commercially possible in our current market, but which people craved for sine long times. Really interested to see in which direction this all goes, it seems at least to be as disruptive as the Internet at its times.

Companies will license models so people can print their own customized shoes, or pre-made designs. Once 3D-printing is advanced enough to print comfortable shoes (or specialized shoes for different needs). We'll get there eventually.

Ok, but will a tool generalized enough to print both a toothbrush holder and a gun be able to do either as cheaply or with as much quality as scaled manufacturing? I know I know, tech always improves, but I'm sceptical if we can expect this to hold here; apples may get better but they won't become oranges.

The deciding factor for me is what are the 3D printed items going to be made out of? I'm guessing it's going to be a BPA fest of toxic plastics (likely not food safe either). What about metals being printed? I guess not so much]